The benefit cap risks turning half of England into a ghetto

http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/jul/24/benefit-cap-risks-turning-half-england-ghetto

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Speak of the British housing crisis anywhere and the same question pops up time and again: isn’t this a London problem? Analysis by the Guardian this week upends that myth, showing that housing is more than just a problem of home ownership and extends wider than the south-east.

At the moment, only certain parts of London are unaffordable to a two-child family receiving benefits in a two-bedroom flat. However, after the benefit cap is reduced to £20,000 (£23,000 in London), the same family will find half of England is off limits.

Related: Lower benefit caps 'will exclude poor families from large parts of England'

The map of areas that will become unaffordable is stark and shows a clear north-south divide, but even larger cities in the north, such as Manchester and Leeds, will be out of reach of struggling families once the cap comes in.

The rhetoric driving the cap – that too many families live gleefully on handouts – overlooks the fact that the housing benefit bill is high because wages are low, and more and more families are being pushed out of social housing and into expensive privately rented accommodation. The people profiting from housing benefit aren’t poor tenants but their landlords.

With rents continuing to rise, there’s no incentive for landlords to reduce rents in line with the benefit cap. They will simply rent to anyone who will pay the asking price. Adverts stipulating that flats aren’t available to those on benefits are no longer uncommon. Once the reduced cap is in place they will likely be as commonplace as “No DSS” signs once were.

Already, politicians and campaigners are warning of social cleansing as councils ship single mothers and poor families out to far-flung boroughs where they have no social network and connection. If the cap leads to a mass exodus from the south of England, it will look more like the Highland clearances than a coherent housing strategy.

The people profiting from housing benefit aren't poor tenants but their landlords

So where will we all live? One of the reasons London’s housing crisis is reaching infamous proportions is because the UK economy has recovered unevenly. The majority of new jobs created are in London, which encourages young graduates and jobseekers to flock to the capital.

The argument that those who can’t afford to live in a city should be forced out misunderstands how cities function. Rather than being citadels of wealth, thriving cities are for everyone: cleaners, nurses, teachers, people on low and high wages. If the poor are forced out of the south, you won’t walk into a Starbucks in Oxford to find an oligarch serving you an espresso, or a hedge fund manager taking your blood pressure on a hospital ward.

Deliberately engineering a situation where the poor are forced to leave their homes and travel hundreds of miles will lead to the ghettoisation of half the country, where the rich flock to London and the south-east, and the poor are sequestered in the north.

Related: Benefit cuts to hit huge number of children, government figures show

Some families will move, but there’s also another likely outcome for a lot of households. Travel around the country and people affected by cuts will tell you that often the only bill they can save on is food. More than a million trips to food banks were made last year and that number is set to increase. The supreme court already ruled that the earlier £26,000 benefit cap breached the UK’s international obligations on children’s rights – a lower cap will affect 330,000 more children.

To lower the housing benefit bill, the government could make work pay rather than implementing a living wage that isn’t enough to live on. Instead, thousands of families will face an exodus or destitution, and unscrupulous private landlords and low-paying businesses will continue to be subsidised through the back door.

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